Biography (read more)
Solomon Cutner was born in the East End of London on 9 August 1902, into a family of German-Jewish and Polish-Jewish tailors, and appeared in public throughout his career under his first name alone. He showed exceptional ability by the age of seven, and made his London debut at eight, on 30 June 1911, in Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. As a child he lived with his teacher Mathilde Verne, who had studied with Clara Schumann; he later worked in Paris with Lazare-Lévy. After the exposure of his prodigy years he withdrew from concert life during adolescence, returning to the platform as an adult.
He began recording in 1929 for English Columbia, and later recorded for His Master’s Voice and EMI. He toured widely in the United States and Australia, particularly around the years of the Second World War, and premiered Arthur Bliss’s Piano Concerto in B flat at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult. He was appointed CBE in 1946 for services to the Forces. In 1956, while recording the complete Beethoven sonatas for EMI, he suffered a stroke that paralysed his right arm. He never performed or recorded in public again, and lived a further thirty-two years, dying in London on 2 February 1988.
Solomon’s reputation rests above all on Beethoven. He broadcast the complete cycle of the thirty-two sonatas for the BBC, and recorded all five concertos together with a substantial group of the sonatas, among them Opp. 90, 101, 106 and 109 to 111; the studio cycle was left unfinished when his stroke ended his career in 1956. Alongside Beethoven he recorded Brahms’s First Concerto and the Handel Variations, Mozart’s concertos Nos. 23 and 24, Schumann’s Carnaval, and a considerable amount of Chopin, together with Bach, Schubert and Debussy.
Commentators have consistently identified clarity, tonal beauty and imaginativeness as the marks of his playing rather than display; the critic Bruce Eder described his Moonlight Sonata as combining poetic lyricism with natural, unforced passion. Because his career stopped abruptly at its height, the surviving EMI recordings carry the whole of his legacy, and their reissue on compact disc, largely through Testament, has kept his Beethoven in the catalogue for decades after he last played.
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